A Bad Hare Day
A Gentle Giant bunny who loves nothing better than watching the butterflies is harassed by a gang of nasty little critters, until he's pushed too far...
The second short film from the Blender Foundation after Elephant's Dream, made partly to drive development of Blender, an open-source 3-D authoring software package, and partly to showcase its capabilities. The plot is simple but the characters are quite charming and the whole thing is reminiscent of Pixar shorts of old.
This short is released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and is downloadable here
or here. Because it's free in all senses, and visually attractive, it's become a standard example clip for showing off what video players can do.
Big Buck Bunny provides examples of:
- Adorable Evil Minions: Granted, all three are fuzzy squirrels, but the chinchilla and red squirrel are cuddly and barely count as evil.
- Alliterative Name: Big Buck Bunny
- All There in the Script: The Blender Cloud page reveals that the characters have names: the bunny is called JC, the red squirrel is Rinky, the chinchilla is Gamera (and also female), and the brown squirrel is Frankie.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Oh yes. When Buck snaps, he really goes all out for revenge.
- Big Fun: Buck. As long as he's in a good mood.
- Big, Thin, Short Trio: The flying squirrel is the short one (not exactly short, but he is the smallest), the red squirrel is the thin one, and the chinchilla is the big one.
- Bird-Poop Gag: The very last shot of the video, after the credits, is a bird defecating onto the flying squirrel kite. The video ends just before impact.
- Bullying a Dragon: Somehow, a trio of small animals thought it would be a good idea to torment a giant rabbit.
- Chasing a Butterfly: Buck chases a butterfly before the squirrels attack and kill it.
- Comically Cross-Eyed: The red squirrel is cross-eyed and the stupidest of the squirrel trio.
- Comic Trio: A more serious variant. The flying squirrel comes up with evil schemes, the red squirrel carries them out while acting stupid, and the chinchilla pretty much gets dragged along.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Buck is surprisingly competent when he's mad.
- Cute Is Evil: Who knew that cute-looking rodents would be so evil as to kill two butterflies and bully an innocent bunny For the Evulz?
- Death Trap: Buck creates an entire course of them to teach the trio a lesson.
- The Ditz: The red squirrel.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The squirrel gang's leader deserves what he gets, but the red squirrel and chinchilla seem to take severe beatings for just following it.
- The Dog Bites Back: The Stinger at the end of the short. That bird that the flying squirrel bullied (twice!) defecates on his head.
- Gentle Giant: Big Buck Bunny. At first.
- Humiliation Conga: The flying squirrel becomes used as Buck's kite. And gets pooped on by the bird he bullied.
- Jerkass: The flying squirrel enjoys tormenting the wildlife a bit too much.
- Lock-and-Load Montage: When Buck starts setting up the traps to get even with the squirrel gang.
- Kick the Dog: The flying squirrel knocking the bird out of the tree with an acorn. Twice. (The bird gets his revenge)
- Misplaced Wildlife: One of the squirrel trio is a South American chinchilla in a short otherwise featuring European / North American fauna.
- Repeat Cut: When the squirrel reveals he's a flying squirrel.
- Oh, Crap!: All villains have their BSOD moments.
- Pretty Butterflies: Purple ones, which Buck likes. And then the squirrel trio had to kill them For the Evulz...
- Rascally Rabbit: Buck may not look the part on first glance, but he can definitely be very cunning when the situation calls for it.
- Save the Villain: Buck saves the flying squirrel from falling onto Spikes of Doom... then uses him as a kite.
- Screwball Squirrel: The three rodents mercilessly torment Buck. The leader is a brown flying squirrel who seems to be the planner behind the pranks, whereas the red squirrel clearly has some screws loose. The third one, who is the least active of the trio, is notably not a squirrel but a chinchilla.
- Shout-Out: To Robin Hood: Several of Buck's traps.
- Slasher Smile: Buck flashes a very nice one to the flying squirrel once he has it in his clutches.
- Spikes of Doom: One of Buck's Death Traps.
- The Stinger: The flying squirrel gets turned into Buck’s kite. And then the bird who the squirrel bulled twice in the film gets his revenge.
- Terrible Trio: The brown flying squirrel, red squirrel and chinchilla.
- This Means Warpaint: The montage of Buck building traps includes a shot of him applying black markings under his eyes.
- Took a Level in Badass: Buck really becomes badass after fleeing the squirrels - although he does take a break at one point to use a tripwire as a jump rope.
- White Bunny: Buck, the titular bunny.
